What I was reading from in April
Dan Chamas’ Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (2022)
Every breakfast I sit with this one, and I have stomped the floor and banged on the table with fist and spoon because Chamas filled the book with tables demonstrating the various rhythms that made Dilla and that Dilla in turn remade. Think the last time I drummed with such ritualization was when I took a percussion class in ninth grade. Think this might also be the last book a student ever gifted me. I’m grateful.
Emma Cline’s The Girls (2016)
Sitting somewhere around 200 pages currently. This read would be a blazing fast one for anyone who prioritized it more than I have, and the reasons for why I haven’t have little to do with how much I’ve enjoyed the book.
Michael Lynn Crews’ Books are Made out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences (2017)
Stalled on this one. Mostly due to time.
Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage (2022)
Hadn’t pulled a short story collection out of any stacks in a while, so I grabbed this one because the weather is warming and oranges are all over the front cover. I’m somewhere in the fourth story “Returning.”
Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978)
I’d read and taught The Things They Carried. I’d read about Going After Cacciato. Now Cacciato is gone.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937)
I’m reading this out loud with a kindergartner because we read it with her sister last summer. The last couple nights we deferred reading it to read some books from the library. This one could sit here a long while.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
I’m reading this out loud with a second grader because the second grader asked me what happens to Gollum after leaving the goblin caves, and my response was to go dig this book out from a closet and hand it over. This one could sit here a long while because this book takes a long while to read out loud.
Yaroslav Trofimov’s Our Enemies Will Vanish (2024)
I’m around 50 pages, which means the events the book date to early 2022 still. Sean Penn has yet to fly the Ukrainian coop, and I can recall most of the events vaguely as the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a frequent topic of conversation in my AP Language & Composition classes, with several students finding ways to weave it into their responses to practice Question 3 prompts. That’s just over two years ago, but it feels like lifetimes. At the time, I thought I’d still be plowing ahead with my teaching career, but I packed it in that June and said enough is enough. Individual careers are not so entrenched as military fetishes or a people united.
